Tuesday, January 14, 2014

What you do in private is one thing. What you discuss in
public is quite another.

Nowhere is this more obvious than when it comes to sex. My
admonitions notwithstanding, more and more people find it natural and normal to
discuss their sexual exploits with those near and dear to them.

If we are to believe an anonymous author on The Frisky, when
women feel compelled to share the graphic details of their latest romp it means
that they hooked up with someone they will probably never see again. In other
words, they do it to manage the pain of a traumatic experience.

Anonymous writes:

When I
was single, I spent a
lot of time talking about my sexual exploits with friends: his penis-to-ball ratio, how chipper
of a mood he was in the morning after, whether or not I wanted to “hit that
again.” It was one of the fun — well, maybe more necessary than fun — parts of being single. When I had
flings or dating stints, all that was left when the dude was out of my life
were the war stories…. I was the circus clown making singledom palatable for
the crowd. Honestly, when I was single, if I didn’t find humor in my sex life,
I would have been a very sad clown.

She is offering an enormously revealing look at the
psychology of hooking up. In order to numb her pain, to overcome the feeling
of emptiness and to stop feeling that she was exploited, she make herself into
a “circus clown” performing for her friends.

She is inclined to overshare about her hookups because, one
imagines, her friends do likewise. It’s like a therapy group. But, more
importantly, she is trying to disown the experience.

Normally, when you discuss a personal experience in public
you are owning it. You are telling other people that you are happy to have them
see you in that context.

That is not, alas, what Anonymous and her girlfriends are
doing. She and they are describing their hookups in such graphic detail that
you come away feeling that she is writing a critique of a porn video. She is
talking about the experience as though it had happened to someone else.

In her words:

I used
to find something almost satisfying in poking fun at a man who would never love
me and I would never love back by talking about his walnut-sized balls. It was
an assertion of my self-worth, a battle cry. It was an acknowledgment that I
knew he wasn’t good enough for me. But we were both single human beings with
sex drives who were waiting to meet someone who was worth getting in deep with.
And in the meantime, we were fucking each other and having a decent time of it.

Surely, Anonymous is not condemning the hookup culture. She
is not flagellating herself for having participated. She is simply saying that
if you submit yourself, even voluntarily, to such a trauma then you will find
yourself needing to mitigate and manage the attendant anguish. Hooking up has a
price.

Obviously, if she were truly proud of the experiences she would
have put her name on her article.

Now that Anonymous has gotten involved in a relationship she
finds that her dormant moral sense has awakened. Now, she refuses to discuss her
sex life.

Allow her to express her view:

When I
got into a serious relationship eight months ago, all talk of my sex life
stopped, even though there was more to discuss than ever before. I was out to
dinner with a group of single girl friends recently and one of them straight up
asked, “Is the sex good?”

I
stuttered and blushed. One of my other friends jumped to my rescue, scolding
her for asking the question. “Hey, that’s personal!”

She was
right, it was personal. But something about that justification irked me. Why
wasn’t it personal when I was single and recounting my night with the guy who
thought it would be fun to put two vibrators in my vagina at once with the same
group of women? I had no problem talking about that guy. But discussing what my boyfriend and I do in bed
feels like a violation of his privacy more than mine. I love him so much that
the thought of one of my friends laughing about his sexual proclivities, his
body, or our most intimate moments together hurts me….

With casual sex, that feeling of
loyalty to your partner is completely absent….

But
alas, my “serious relationship” status makes me feel bound to a code of silence
I never needed to honor before.

Most interesting, her sense of loyalty to her lover,
her sexual honor code seems to have kicked in in automatically.

It’s no longer about performing for the peanut gallery. It’s
now about betraying a confidence.

3 comments:

That would presume that there are people who can be called Ladies and Gentlemen. Thinks like manners, politeness, respect, ladies, gentlemen, et al were discarded as a sign of patriarchal oppression of women. Many of the issues and problems we deal with today stem from a growing degradation of anything that has as its foundation a morality underpinned by respect, et al.